Monday, July 22, 2024

Ghosts of Now


Ghosts of previous nows in the now haunt our daydreams in a recursive manner.

Another etymological connection worth remembering: "to haunt" and "to frequent". 

To frequent a place is to come back to it often, but then one may abandon past haunts for other frequencies, only to encounter their ghosts in future terms (times).

Oblique to "frequency" in Synergetics is "angle" or "shape" which comes across as liminal, transitory, given our experience is in-universe episodic. We're tuned in. What's "out" is what might enable our next leap through a portal, to some other world (frequency, channel, system, plot).

What evokes our sense of "time machines" i.e. of different times coexisting in parallel, reachable from one to another, is a sense of the timeless, what unites all the times with a physics we maybe wouldn't recognize on paper. 

The new world has its rules, all too familiar in the sense that our codification of them has always been incomplete, in the old world as well. The sense we might expand our appreciation for the underlying physics take us into a twilight zone of non-consensus reality, the private language of solipsistic research.

The criterion that runs through liminal space collections, defining their genre, is their depopulated nature. We have the specific angle and viewpoint of the individual, somewhat forgotten and storyless, and likely no one else. 

Phenomena get reduced to a bare minimum, drained of ideation to become "suchness", and a sense of  claustrophobia (or maybe freedom) comes from the missing plot, the absence of any sense of eventual convergence to some resolution. What's to resolve?

In the timeless liminal spaces of the interwebs, nothing ever happens that would disturb its equanimity. This resting in peace is offset by the Matrix, or rather the many matrices or worlds, the sound stages, that ornament and implement the rules (explore their consequences) in recursively fractal specificity.

Saturday, July 13, 2024

Anthropology Reading

Synergetics Livestream #020.1 ~  Omnitopology, Interference Domains, Numerology

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Operation DuckRabbit

MathArtStream 4 ~ Kirby Urner: “Dimension" in Synergetics

Nominalist thinking involves playing "pin the tail on the donkey", where the tail is some "signifier" like the numeral 2, and the donkey is twoness itself, the essence of two, for which the numeral is but a name. We're allowed to get loquacious about what twoness truly entails. We might say "the set of all sets of two elements". If we're into Synergetics, we'll speak of axial twoness (additive, rotating) versus inside-outside twoness (multiplicative, resizing).

Take the word "infinity": to what does it point, in order to get its meaning? Those with a rich imagination may flash on several images but is that what it means to mean something, i.e. to flash on images?  Might a signifier have a use without a signified? Put another way: how might we use words as a means without needing them to have referents?

In the above talk, I will focus on the word "dimension" and suggest this word has meaning through embeddings in language games, such as our "three-tuples determine a location in space" talk. What about 4-tuples? Let's talk about quadrays.

I introduce the concept of namespaces by showing how we already had a bifurcation in the meaning of "fourth dimension" by the time we got to Minkowski versus Hilbert spaces. 

The possibility of non-Euclidean geometries had already led to forks at the fifth postulate. But might we venture away from the Euclidean lineage by going in some other direction, meaning-wise, such as by rewiring "dimension talk"? 

Enter Karl Menger and the geometry of lumps.

Enter Synergetics and yet another namespace wherein 4D is a tentpole, helping to anchor another circus tent. 

A minimum box or room, a container, with no sides or lids left off, no windows or doors left open, has four walls, not the six a hexahedron has. Ergo space is four-directional (or say dimensional). Call that austere primitive beginning "pre-frequency" and then subdivide from there, adding spin, color, energy, nuance.

So there we have at least three namespaces using "dimension" in characteristic language games by the end of the 20th Century and onward.

Plus lets not forget the fractional dimensions of discrete maths. "Infinity" rears its head in this namespace as well, like the monster in Loch Ness, even as we zoom into a Mandelbrot Set (or Mandelbulb, as the case may be).

Countering nominalism, is operationalism, or Wittgenstein's "meaning as use". The rules emerge from the playing, while meaning is more or less fleeting, depending on the half-life of the containing corpus.

Sunday, June 30, 2024

Hypertoons vs Dreamcasts


I don't know that these dreamcasts are really called that; I was just looking for a word. Are they the hypertoons I've been describing, i.e. smooth transformations between keyframes in a network? They could be. Hybrids are doable, by simply adding repetition and branching.

More to the point is attention to a specific corpus. My paradigm hypertoons, the corpus I've personally explored, is that of one "concentric hierarchy" i.e. a nest or maze of polyhedrons. I've elsewhere suggested "a cabal" of polyhedrons (or how about "bouquet"?). The Synergetics namespace is already self-consciously intra-corpus transformative in a right brainish animated way.

Rather than surrender to the stochastic randomness of generative graphics, we could use AI to make some of the segments, but then loop in other segments developed by other means. Children's Television Workshop has always been a model: come up with canonical representations of A-Z, 0-100, and have the segments segue through those. An AI fantasy about the letter A turns to a claymation. These might be among the art school's warm-up exercises, with benefits to children.

For example, we want the Jitterbug, treated over and over by different graphical artists. Once at an icosahedron, we have so many ways to go. It might become a nucleocapsid. It might unfold into a world map. The icosahedron might take its place in a flextegrity lattice, underwater, with fish.